The Rule of Harm

Living in a lawless world

We live in a world in which we are compelled to harm. For those of us in the minority world, access to society can now only be granted through engaging with systems of harm. Our food is created by industrial agriculture; our telecommunication devices—necessary for navigating modernity—are mined by exploited labourers; our transport to work is fossil-fuelled; our choices at the polls dismiss the reality of a green economy. At times it seems like the best we can do is buy green versions of products, playing into the political paradigm that desperately undercuts labour power and civilian discourse: we are consumers, not citizens.

A system built on extraction, exploitation and violence is categorically harmful. Outside of exiting that system entirely, we are compelled to do harm by living in it and as part of it. The exit route, however, has been slowly blocked off for centuries, with the enclosure of the commons, the centralisation of power and the rampant proliferation of private property. With the shrinking of the land, and the severance of people’s relationship to the land, came the shrinking of our options and agency. Too often, we simply have no choice but to harm, and so that even those of us who are not incentivised to do so are compelled to do so. And let me be clear: doing nothing in a harmful system is doing harm. 

Refusal to do harm results in backlash. I am writing this after having interviewed Gianluca Grimalda, the climate change researcher who was fired for refusing to fly back from his field trip. Yet, in the interview, Gianluca reminds us of the environmental defenders who lay down their lives to protect pockets of our precious biosphere from rampant logging, mining and other industries. Those who aren’t killed are thrown in jail for years, like the two women who sabotaged the Dakota access pipeline over a period of months after handing themselves in. That climate activists and environmental defenders are dragged before courts to be tried for raising the alarm while fossil fuel companies and other industries engage in monstrous violence daily only shows the limitations of justice and the nature of the system: private property can be harmed, but not nature. With the Law built to define and protect ownership, the sovereignty of the wild world will always be sacrificed, for it cannot be recognised under a system of privatisation. The British government said earlier this year that it will never recognise that nature has rights.

Of course, that our Laws focus only on rights, not rights and responsibilities, is part of the problem, too. If industries were genuinely responsible for their waste, they would not create nearly as much. If activists were understood as responsible citizens, they would not face jail time. If the Law enshrined a code of responsibilities, we could sue our governments for their failures. Thankfully, this is beginning to happen anyway, and the knock-on effect of the Swiss women’s climate case against their government in the European Court of Human Rights could be immense. But it is a stark recognition that harm is the default, and we are fighting for a world of responsibility and care. 

I find it difficult to argue that we are democratic citizens living in “free countries” if we can be compelled to do harm by our employers and governments, the long arm of the Law reaching into our most private moments, overshadowing our moral duty with threats of dismissal and incarceration. And we’re the lucky ones considering, elsewhere, this logic is advanced to another level and lives are taken to protect industrial projects.

People often ask me what to do and I rarely have a straight answer because action needs to be dependent on locale. However, it’s possible to begin with a principle: reduce the harm you cause, then help your community to reduce the harm it causes. Starting with harm reduction is important because otherwise any positive action only offsets harm. But then, after reducing harm, turn to care and stewardship: what can you protect? What can we nurture? What can we restore? I am a huge proponent of rewilding in all areas, big or small, urban or rural. But restoration is not just gardening on a grand scale. In some nations like the U.K., restoring our waterways is utterly critical and demands political action like renationalising water companies, or legal action like suing them. Restoring our skies will demand reducing traffic to lower pollution and implementing better public transport, ideally run on batteries. Restoring our collective mental health will involve the creation of many more green spaces, caps on energy prices, increasing minimum wage or at the very least capping rental prices. 

We need legislation to do all these things. We need the Law and our political institutions to achieve these things at scale, although I’m all for communities bypassing the Law and taking matters into their own hands in the interim. In fact, it may be that only by this bottom-up approach will we manage to wrestle with the Law’s failures to compel it towards care rather than harm. It may be that we have to refuse the rule of Harm in order to live well; it may be we have to compel the Law to change by ignoring it. 

This will incur the same backlash, on a greater scale, as power mobilises to maintain itself. Indeed, undermining the rule of Law is a dangerous political act. But it has already been done. It has been done by Israel who has acted with impunity for 70 years, or the United States who illegally invades sovereign nations and overthrows elected leaders. Because, really, there is no Law in a Rule of Harm, only possession, domination and violence. And those who reject living by Rule of Harm? These peoples and nations, like Cuba, are sanctioned into geopolitical irrelevance—but remain cultural beacons of possibility. 

---